


Don't Make a Wave

by girlinstory



Category: Captain America (Movies), The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: 1970s, Alternate History, Avenger's: Endgame, Avenger's: Endgame Spoilers, Multi, Nuclear Testing, Politics, Pride, Referenced cannibalism, Richard Nixon - Freeform, booty shorts, endgame spoilers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-26
Updated: 2019-04-26
Packaged: 2020-02-04 19:55:17
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 2,123
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18611419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/girlinstory/pseuds/girlinstory
Summary: Post-Avenger: Endgame. This summary will contain spoilers for Avenger's: Endgame.The adventures of Steve, Peggy, and Bucky in the 1970s: because that was Bucky's song playing in the final scene.





	1. Chapter 1

Steve was determined not to make too big a splash in 1970. The future wasn’t perfect, but he didn’t want to be responsible for making it worse. His conviction lasted just over one year, which meant that Bucky won the bet. 

On October 31, 1971, someone threw a candle through the neighbor’s window. It seemed like such a waste. The other kids just threw rocks. 

The neighbor in question was Mr. Schlesinger, the head of the Atomic Energy Commission. He was the power behind the upcoming Cannikin Nuclear Test in Amchitka, but Steve was pretty the only reason someone threw a Cannikin Yankee Candle through his window was because he was handing out candy corn. 

Everyone knew you were supposed to hand out individually wrapped candy so everyone would know you hadn’t put razor blades in it. (Steve would have gladly taken a Snickers bar with razor blades in it over candy corn.)

The Schlesingers were flying out to Amchitka, Alaska on November 6, 1971. The Governor of Alaska said that if Mr. Schlesinger felt it to be safe, he should take his family there. So he was.

Cannikin was an underground nuclear test. It was the third nuclear test at Amchitka. They had set off the first bomb to see if they could tell the difference between normal earthquakes and ones caused by Russian nukes. They had set off the second bomb to see if they could set off an even bigger bomb. This was that bomb.

The bomb was clean, but experts were still worried about repercussions like earthquakes and tsunamis. (“We’re American,” Mr. Schlesinger had said. “We call them tidal waves.”)

Peggy had seen the damage done by the nuclear bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Now the government wanted to test bombs with six-hundred-times that explosive power. 

Steve had read about the Cannikin Nuclear Tests when he was trying to catch up on missed history. The bombs had been tested, and done minimal damage. Those bombs had only been  _ four _ -hundred-times the explosive power of Little Boy and Fat Man. 

During the second test, the cliff sides fell into sea and the ocean boiled into foam. It created a new lake that was over a mile wide, killed birds, and split the skulls of thousands of sea otters. Steve kept telling Bucky that the otters were in a better place, until Bucky finally snapped and said, “Well, yeah, Steve. It’s not  _ Alaska _ .” 

There was another reason they wanted to prevent the nuclear testing at Amchitka. There had been an earthquake on the island in 1964 that set off tidal waves which reached Japan. 

(“By the time they got there, the waves were about six inches high. My dick’s bigger than that,” Mr. Schlesinger had said. “Besides, we don’t even let the Japs have nuclear weapons.”)

“Well,” said Bucky. “At least World War Three will be short.”

“Imagine being the person who started a war over… over a misunderstanding,” said Steve, after they finished listening to that tape. 

“I think that’s how all wars start.”

“But it didn’t happen in your future,” said Peggy. 

“But this future isn’t my future,” said Steve, who had tried to explain time travel to them but was somewhat hindered by the fact that he didn’t understand it himself, “And in my future, Howard Stark grew a conscience and tried to shut down the Atomic Energy Commission. With Stark annoying Schlesinger into action, who knows what he might do?”

On the tape, Mr. Schlesinger said, “You know tidal waves are an unlikely scenario. What’s much more likely is the possibility small fissures that will release radioactive material over a long period of time, but it’s okay. That’s easy to cover up.”

Before the test could take place, a chartered boat arrived in Amchitka. A Naval vessel attempted to stop the Don’t Make a Wave Committee, but thanks to the tactical planning of the protesters, they were able to avoid the military altogether. The news coverage drummed up by their protests successfully prevented the test. 

The mission was called Greenpeace, the same name eventually given to the organization borne of it. Steve Barnes and James Rogers were founding members. Peggy was too busy making sure Mr. Schlesinger got filed. They had more than enough on tape. 

Mission #2: Nixon. 


	2. Chapter 2

TRANSCRIPT OF A RECORDING OF A

TELEPHONE CALL BETWEEN THE PRESIDENT

AND CHARLES COLSON ON NOVEMBER 8, 1972 FROM

6:49 PM TO 7:27 PM

**********

COLSON:     Sir, we’ve been trying get to ahold of you. Are you still in Florida?

PRESIDENT: I’ve been on the phone with Bebe. I’m at the Winter White House until Monday. You know that, Chuck. Mary gave you my schedule. Where are you?

COLSON:     I’m at home. Sir—

PRESIDENT: Well, what the [expletive deleted] are you doing there? You should come down here. Bob’s here. The weather’s great. Bebe’s bringing some stuff from the Cocolobo Cay Club. We’re going to take the boat out, make cocktails, maybe go for a swim. 

COLSON:     Listen, Mr. President— Isn’t Pat in Washington? 

PRESIDENT: Not Baby, Chuck.  _ Bebe _ .

COLSON: Well, it doesn’t- Bebe Rebozo?

PRESIDENT: Yes.

COLSON:     Dick, you went swimming with Bebe Rebozo yesterday.

PRESIDENT: That’s right. 

COLSON:     And then you had dinner with him.

PRESIDENT: Right.

COLSON:     And then went swimming again.

PRESIDENT: That’s right. Just great. High eighties. Why, you wouldn’t know it’s November if the kids weren’t making snowmen out of sand. 

COLSON:     And then you watched  _ Under the Yum Yum Tree _ .

PRESIDENT: Chuck, did you call for a reason?

COLSON:    Sir, there was a— What’s that sound?

_ [Guys like us we had it made, _

_ Those were the days.] _

PRESIDENT: Oh, it’s that show- that show with that Arch fellow.  

_ [And you knew who you were then, _

_ Girls were girls and men were men.] _

PRESIDENT: I had the TV on while I was getting ready. I wasn’t watching it. That show glorifies homosexuality.

_ [Mister we could use a man _

_ Like Herbert Hoover again.] _

PRESIDENT: The point is, I do not mind the homosexuality. I understand it. [14 second beep.] But nevertheless, the point I make is that [expletive deleted] I do not think that you glorify on public television homosexuality. The reason you don’t glorify it, Chuck, anymore than you glorify uh, uh, uh, whores— now we all know that people go to whores, and we all know that people are just— uh, do that, and we all have weaknesses and so forth and so on, but [expletive deleted] what do you think- what do you think that does to kids?  

What do you think that does to eleven and twelve year old boys when they see that? Why is it that the Scouts— the— why is it that the Boys Clubs we were in— we constantly had to clean up the staffs to keep the [expletive deleted] fags out of it, because— not because of them, they can go out and do anything they damn please, [unintelligible] all those kids? You know, there's a little tendency among them all.

Well by God can I tell you it outraged me. Not for any moral reason. Most people are outraged for moral reasons. I— It outraged me because I don't want to see this country go that way. You know there are countries— You ever see what happened— you know what happened to the Greeks. Homosexuality destroyed them. Sure, Aristotle was a homo, we all know that. So was Socrates. Do you know what happened to the Romans— Romans? The last six Roman emperors were fags. The last six. Nero had a public wedding to a boy. Yeah. And they'd [unintelligible]. You know that.

You know what happened to the Popes? It's all right when the, Po-Po-Popes were laying the nuns, that's been going on for years, centuries, [laugher] but, when the popes, when the Catholic Church went to hell in— I don't know— three or four centuries ago, it was homosexual. And finally it had to be cleaned out.

Now, that's what's happened to Britain. It happened earlier to France. And let's look at the strong societies. The Russians. God damn it, they root them out. They don't let them around at all. You know what I mean? I don't know what they do with them. Now, we are allowing this in this country when we show [unintelligible].

Dope? Do you think the Russians allow dope? Hell no. Not if they can allow, not if they can catch it. They send them up. You see, homosexuality, dope, immorality in general; these are the enemies of strong societies. That's why the Communists and the left-wingers are pushing the stuff. They're trying to destroy us.

COLSON:     Dick, let me be candid with you. Next year is an— It’s an election year next year.

PRESIDENT: You think I don’t know that? The Committee to Re-Elect the President is—

COLSON: Look Dick, we could launder all the money in the Federal Reserve, but CREEP the will have all the political power of the Girl Scouts once this gets out. The spying alone—

PRESIDENT: Is that all? Oh, [expletive deleted]. We’ll have to get rid of this tape too.

COLSON: Don’t worry, sir. This phone line isn’t part of the taping system yet.

PRESIDENT: Oh, good. 

COLSON: But if this does get out, you’ll be remembered as the president who did more damage to Hollywood than  _ The Zodiac Killer _ .

PRESIDENT: I thought the Zodiac Killer was in Northern California.

COLSON:  I meant the movie. Sir, do you remember what happened to the Rosenbergs? They were electrocuted because they conspired with Russia. The Pope himself had asked President Eisenhower to spare them, but no President of the United States would ever condone conspiring with Russia.

[Muffled laughter from unidentified subject.]

PRESIDENT: Did you hear that? I thought you said this phone line wasn’t part of the taping system.

COLSON: It isn’t, sir. Now my point is: The Rosenbergs were just conspiring with the Russians. Think what they’ll do to you. 

PRESIDENT: We’re being tapped. I’m hanging up, Chuck. 

COLSON:  But sir, we have to—

[Click.]


	3. Chapter 3

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This fic is set after the penultimate scene in Avenger's Endgame, after Steve as an old man. For an explanation of how this occurred, please see my fic: It's Been a Long, Long Time.

In 2022, Steve wore booty shorts to protest the sexism in school dress codes. It was still America’s ass, even if it was wrinkled.

The Supreme Court couldn’t have impeded on that particular form of free speech if they wanted to (and not all of them did) so they kicked Bucky out for laughing too loudly.

They visited The Queens Detention Facility, bringing attention to conditions that hadn’t improved since the Orange Scare. The privatized prison had opened in the 90s to house immigrants. After a series of hunger strikes to protest poor conditions in 2005, the prison had let their contract with ICE expire. They had renewed it in 2019. There had already been more hunger strikes, although that was just because no one wanted to eat the food.

Steve and Bucky, two boys raised on meat and potatoes, helped to pass the Meat Intervention Act. Greenhouse emissions dropped by twenty percent, and world hunger dropped by seventy. There was finally enough agriculture to feed all the starving children on TV. Especially after Pepper released the drone bees.

Most people adopted a kind of sullen denial, ignoring the asterisks on their menus. Test tube meat was essentially the same as the real thing. Some people swore they could taste the difference, but no one North of the American Heart Attack Land. Only the people who still thought the South just needed some Viagra.

When New York reinstated the death penalty (and allowed the wealthy to pay exorbitant amounts of money to have a death row inmate’s body prepared and served to them by a celebrity chef), Steve and Bucky protested that. Bucky told graphic stories about how Hydra forced him to eat parts of himself, because: “They grew back if I lost them after ‘82, and it was Russia; We got snowed in a lot.”

They helped to legalize greener methods of body disposal, including, ironically: promession (freezing and shattering), liquefaction (melting), preservation (donating your body to science), plastination (donating your body to art), transplantation (donating your body to other people), and during an unfortunate crossover period in their campaigning: digestion (donating your body to a charity dinner).

They helped the female Avengers breathe new life into #MeToo (in part by naming it #YouToo when they realized they weren't the only ones who still read the hashtag as "pound").

Wanda kept making social media posts that said things like:

_BREAKING NEWS IN THE #YOUTOO SCANDAL: STEVE ROGERS AND BUCKY BARNES..._

_...Have not been accused to sexual harassment (except by each other)._

They went to Pride, every year, even when Steve's hip gave out, and they had to get their own float.


End file.
